Amanda Donohoe and Chris Pitt in Ken Russell’s “The Lair of the White Worm” (1988), which was directly influenced by the darkly magical work of Michael Reeves. Credit Lionsgate Home Entertainment

The director Fernando Di Leo, left, on the set of “The Italian Connection” (1972)

New York Times Review of Revenge of the Blood Beast

"Credited with directing three déclassé horror movies, dead from an overdose of barbiturates at 25, the British filmmaker Michael Reeves (1943-1969) is a quintessential cult figure.

Reeves, like Steven Spielberg and the avant-gardist brothers George and Mike Kuchar, made eight-millimeter films in his movie-obsessed youth and, on a trip to America, paid an unannounced visit to his Hollywood idol, the genre director Don Siegel — an act of chutzpah that actually resulted in a job. After working in commercials and as an assistant director, Reeves made and even partly financed his first feature, “Revenge of the Blood Beast” (1966), newly out on Blu-ray from Raro Video."

New York Times review of Fernando Di Leo

"As a screenwriter and later a director Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003) traversed the golden years of Italian genre cinema. He was one of the team of writers who helped turn Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” into Sergio Leone’s “Fistful of Dollars,” a credit that led to a couple dozen more spaghetti western screenplays as that subgenre conquered the world. (And — or so he tells Luca Rea in a 2001 interview republished in the booklet that accompanies the RaroVideo collection — he was the only one to realize that Kurosawa was inspired by the Dashiell Hammett novel “Red Harvest.”)"

Paolo Gioli, The Perforated Cameraman, 1979, still from a black-and-white film, 9 minutes.

Paolo Gioli Experimental cinema

"His own tactics have included creating collages of found footage, abrading and painting on leader, and, most infamously, constructing pinhole cameras from bread loaves and seashells. Closely related to his experimental photographic work (which has already wended its way into the collections of MoMA and the Centre Pompidou), the often dazzling results constitute an iconoclastic and prescient body of film work that’s only now coming to wider attention."